ESA

NASA and the European Space Agency’s Hubble Space Telescope has been in low Earth orbit for nearly 28 years, but with several repairs and upgrades over the decades it’s still sending back beautiful images. Just a few days ago, the ESA released this Hubble image of a pair of barred spiral galaxies some 350 million light years away in the process of merging, their two galactic nuclei still separated by a massive distance but throwing out clouds of hot gas and mid-formation stars. Read More >>

Neutron stars aren’t the twinkle-twinkle kind you typically see in the night sky. They’re stellar corpses, and incredibly dense sources of gravity, with perhaps 1.5 times the mass of the sun packed into an area less than a dozen miles across. Around 9,000 light years away from Earth, one neutron stars seems to have befriended a red giant. And scientists observed the new relationship beginning in a flash of energy. Read More >>

Gravitational waves may be the most exciting thing in astronomy right now, but there are only so many things in space that scientists can study with Earth-based gravitational wave detectors. An incredible new test has demonstrated that space-based detectors could become a reality, which could open our ears to entirely new sources of gravitational waves. Read More >>

Despite being closest to the sun, Mercury is the most ignored terrestrial planet in the solar system. It’s had to sit back and watch while Earth, Mars, and even Venus get all the attention. At night, if you listen closely, you can hear Mercury screaming into the dark void of space, begging for love. Read More >>

The European Space Agency is trying to drum up a bit of support for delivering 5G services via satellite. This is a departure from the current system of of huge masts dotted everywhere, although it's quite unlikely that satellites will totally replace these. Read More >>

On March 24th, ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet was joined by NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The outing was fairly routine, but this amazing footage captured by Pesquet gives all of us stuck here on Earth an amazing first-person look of what it’s like to be an astronaut looking down on our planet. Read More >>

The European Space Agency is in talks with Chinese space authorities about exciting things they might be able to do together in the future with all that money China has from selling us t-shirts and phones, and top of the list is one of sci-fi's longest running themes -- a permanent base on the moon. Read More >>

If you've ever fancied dying by being beaned in the head by an errant piece of space junk, you might just be in luck. A study by an aerospace engineering expert shows our plans for space WiFi could cause a whole load of satellite crashes. Read More >>

Mars rovers are great for many reasons, most importantly, because they allow us to live vicariously through a hunk of metal exploring the Red Planet. NASA’s currently working on a yet-to-be-named rover mission slated for 2020, and is in the process of narrowing down a landing location. Similarly, the European Space Agency (ESA) has just announced that it’s debating two locations for its 2020 ExoMars rover, which will search for signs of ancient life. Read More >>

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Galileo satellites have been having a bad time for the past 17 years. Now, the 10 billion euro project has suffered what might be its strangest setback yet: Nine clocks across the 18 Galileo satellites in orbit have suddenly stopped working. For a fleet that was supposed to create an independent European GPS system, the satellites really can’t seem to get their shit together. Read More >>

In case Schiaparelli’s crash-landing left you thinking the European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission was a bust, rest assured it wasn’t. The mission’s scientific workhorse—its Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO)—is performing beautifully, as evidenced by the first images and splashes of data ESA has now received back from the Red Planet. Read More >>

The European Space Agency has released new information about the crash of the ExoMars Schiaparelli lander. Soon after the deployment of its parachute, the lander made a miscalculation so bad that it thought it was below the Martian surface, when in reality was still two miles high. Read More >>